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Haunting Hands

Mobile Media Practices and Loss

Kathleen M. Cumiskey and Larissa Hjorth

Draws on cross-cultural case studies of mobile media use in and around personal and public rituals of mourning

Diverse examples and case studies include how performance artists use mobile media to consolidate a sense of community and belonging after a public trauma or natural disaster

Brings together cultural studies and psychological approaches to explore the nascent but highly important field of mobile media practices in and around loss

Haunting Hands

Mobile Media Practices and Loss

Kathleen M. Cumiskey and Larissa Hjorth

Description

Haunting Hands looks closely at the consequences of digital media's ubiquitous presence in our lives, in particular the representing, sharing, and remembering of loss. From Facebook tribute pages during public disasters to the lingering digital traces on a smartphone of the deceased, the digital is both extending earlier memorial practices and creating new ways in which death and loss manifest themselves. The ubiquity of digital specters is particularly evident in mobile media spanning smartphones, iPads, iPhones, or tablets. Mobile media entangle various forms of social, online and digital media in specific ways that are both intimate and public, and yet the use of mobile media in contexts of loss has been relatively overlooked. Haunting Hands seeks to address this growing and important area by helping us to understand the relationship between life, death, and our digital after-lives.

Haunting Hands

Mobile Media Practices and Loss

Kathleen M. Cumiskey and Larissa Hjorth

Author Information

Kathleen M. Cumiskey, City University of New York, and Larissa Hjorth, RMIT University

Kathleen M. Cumiskey is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the College of Staten Island - City University of New York. Since 2003, Cumiskey has studied the social psychological consequences of the use of mobile media. Her work has been published in multiple journals (Feminist Media Studies, Media Asia) and as chapters in edited volumes (The Handbook of Psychology of Communication Technology; The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media). She is also the co-editor, with Larissa Hjorth, of the volume, Mobile Media Practices, Presence and Politics: The Challenge of Being Seamlessly Mobile (Routledge, 2013).

Larissa Hjorth is an artist, digital ethnographer and Professor in the School of Media & Communication, RMIT University. Hjorth studies the socio-cultural dimensions of mobile media and play in the Asia-Pacific as outlined in her books, Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific (2009), Games & Gaming (2010), Online@AsiaPacific (with M. Arnold, 2013), Understanding Social Media (with S. Hinton, 2013) and Gaming in Locative, Social and Mobile Media (with I. Richardson, 2014). She recently co-edited The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media (with G. Goggin, 2014) and The Routledge Handbook to New Media in Asia (with O. Khoo, 2016).

Haunting Hands

Mobile Media Practices and Loss

Kathleen M. Cumiskey and Larissa Hjorth

Reviews and Awards

"The significance of mobile media is marked not by their ubiquity but by their deep embedding in everyday life, and evolving practices around of mortality, memory, and memorialization make this vividly clear. We could not hope for better guides to this complicated topic than Kathleen Cumiskey and Larissa Hjorth. Subtle and sophisticated, Haunting Hands shows in intimate detail how media connect us - and shape our experience at the same time." - Paul Dourish, Chancellor's Professor of Informatics, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine

"I am haunted by this book. By the challenge to write a review that gives justice to the complex connections analysed. By the temptations to take the well-developed central concepts and apply them further. In Haunting Hands we see an anthropological and social-constructivist cross-disciplinary take on the omnipresence of mobile media in everyday life. The authors describe the basic importance of rituals for sensemaking and cultural embeddedness, and how the mobile devices (especially smart phones and tablets) become intimate companions. The authors develop a convincing argument about how our use of handheld devices is at once connected to tradition and established rituals and at the same time reshaping and reinventing those rituals." - Stine Gotved, European Journal of Communication